The Archive of Unattained Futures

The Archivist is about what stories we tell, which images we keep and how this effects our perception of reality. In The archivist, the stories of Change, the time-traveller, are told over four series of fifteen videos. Each series tells the story of Change’s travels to one of the four utopia, as defined by Sofie Verraest in Eutopia Unbound. The videos are made on the basis of archival photos that are in the public domain. The stories are written in collaboration with GPT-3, an AI that was trained on a dataset of books, Wikipedia and texts published on the internet.

The animation was mostly done in After Effects with the help of a great tool, DUIK BASSEL.2. Most of the elements like clouds, dust particles, fireworks, etc. were generated in Houdini and rendered in Blender.

In the video game Ad Hominem, you, as the spectator and the game player, are Change. You visit your hometown and meet old friends and lovers. They are all confident in their views, either progressive or conservative, and/or believe in either collectivism or individualism, and attempt to persuade you in what you should bring into the future. In your dialogues with them, you have to choose an answer from a set of two options, eventually leading to an “event” that the whole town awaits in celebration of your return. Feeling more trapped than having the agency of choice in the bifurcating paths, you realize you, Change, are not really welcome.

This project leaned heavily on a good pipeline, since there was a total of 108 shots we had to create. Each shot consisted of a life action plate whereof the background had to be replaced with an animated environment. Blender was the software of choice to create and render the 3D scene for each environment. For cloth simulations I used Houdini, all compositing was done in Fusion.